Sometime in 2007, the small-budget movie Once came to the Rialto, the independent theater a few blocks from my house. My daughter was with her dad, I’m sure, and I walked to the theater to see the movie on my own that night. It’s my favorite place to see a movie, and I’ve always loved going to the movies solo when I’ve had the chance.

What I’d read about Once made it clear it would be up my alley; I love what I think of as quiet movies.

I did love it – the cast and settings and story and especially the music. I loved the fact that the leads, Markéta Irglová and Glen Hansard, were musicians first and actors second (and I believe this was the first acting job for Irglová; Hansard had been in The Commitments, but was not an actor by trade). I had a soft spot for Irglová’s character, a young mother who was an immigrant from the Czech Republic, where I had lived a decade or so before.

I thought Once was magical, and I remember thinking that it was just what I had needed that night — and that I wanted to get the soundtrack right away.

The way I know how much the music and the story affected me is that I can bring myself back to the walk home that night. I remember the route that I walked and (at the risk of sounding way too sentimental) the afterglow that I felt from the charming story and moving music. This all sounds over-the-top, but I’m grateful for every visceral memory of experiences that moved me like this.

I did get the soundtrack — maybe even that night, since digital music makes for instant gratification — and I listened to it over and over again in the weeks after, and then regularly over the years (especially my two favorite songs, Falling Slowly and Lies).

This excerpt from Wikipedia gives a little taste of the backstory that I found so appealing:

“Produced on a shoestring, about 75% of the budget was funded by Bord Scannán na hÉireann (The Irish Film Board), plus some of Carney’s own money. The director gave his salary to the two stars, and promised a share of the back-end for everyone if the film was a success. Shot with a skeleton crew on a 17-day shoot, the filmmakers saved money by using natural light and shooting at friends’ houses.[9] The musical party scene was filmed in Hansard’s own flat, with his personal friends playing the partygoers/musicians[10]—his mother, Catherine Hansard, is briefly featured singing solo. The Dublin street scenes were recorded without permits and with a long lens so that many passersby didn’t even realize that a film was being made. The long lens also helped the non-professional actors relax and forget about the camera, and some of the dialogue ended up being improvised.[8]” Jan 6, 2018
Irglová and Hansard began touring as “The Swell Season” a few years later, and I took my nine-year-old daughter to their May 2010 concert at the NC Art Museum amphitheater one beautiful summer night. We ended up very close to the stage, and she managed to charm the security folks enough that they let her sit on the far edge of the stage toward the end. I miraculously found a couple of photos from that night — another magical one.

A year or two later, Irglová and Hansard began touring as “The Swell Season,” and I took my then-very-young daughter to their concert at a nearby amphitheater one beautiful summer night. She managed to charm the folks in charge enough that they let her sit on the far edge of the stage toward the end. Somewhere, there are videos of that night — another magical one.

In 2018, I posted this: “Watched Once again tonight; I loved everything about it ... the music, the fact that the film was so rough around the edges, the back story, the cast ... even the bits of Czech conversation, which made me nostalgic for Prague.”

A few days ago, I was shocked and sad to see headlines about Glen Hansard’s death in an early-morning solo motorcycle accident near Dublin at a place called Strawberry Beds; I could not help thinking that if a troubadour has to go too early, Strawberry Beds sounds like a poetic place. And it was far too early, of course; he was only 56, which seems so young now that the years are flying by me.

I thought back to that long-ago night in the theater, listening to Irglová and Hansard make magic onscreen and through their music, bringing me some joy I remember needing at that time.

I wondered what the critics had said about the film back then, and I found a mention of the New York Times review in the paper’s article about Hansard’s death.

“You can’t take your eyes off them,” the critic A.O. Scott wrote of Mr. Hansard and Ms. Irglová in a video review for The New York Times, adding that the film was “almost perfect.”

I’m wishing for an afterlife filled with music for Glen Hansard, and I’m grateful for the part he played in such a fond musical memory of mine.

I’m glad for a new season, and I’m glad to have a very quick list of recommendations to offer — quick, meaning that it is a list without a lot of background. I have realized that I will share a tiny percentage of the many cool things I encounter out in the world if I obsess over describing them all perfectly. This list is a mix of old and new favorites.

• I’ll start with this favorite fall photo I took many years ago of flaming trees outside a church-turned-residence across from my daughter’s elementary school.

• Instagram reel of a son revisiting his sculptor father’s quirky work on a New York cathedral – this popped up recently, and I loved so much about this glimpse of a weird and delightful artistic labor of love and a son’s nostalgia.
  

• The Clearing – Haunting and poignant true crime story that left me teary-eyed in the grocery store as I listened to the end. The Clearing tells the story of April Balascio, who began to suspect that her father was responsible for at least one cold case involving two murdered teenagers and reached out to police. What flowed from that phone call was heart-breaking and layered. (After it came to mind as I began to draft this list, I went back and re-listened to all eight episodes; powerful storytelling.)
  

• WNBA Most Valuable Player A’ja Wilson and the 2025 WNBA season in general – My daughter turned me into a WNBA fan, and the season that just wrapped up was filled with great play and great stories. My daughter’s favorite team is the Las Vegas Aces, and they got off to a very rough start this year, with the low point being a 53-point loss to the Minnesota Lynx. Ouch.
  
  Aces star A’ja Wilson (whose name was inspired by the Steely Dan song), led them back from that low point, but the team is full of stellar players who helped them win their third championship in four years on October 10th. I’m accustomed to pulling for underdogs, and the Aces (and A’ja Wilson) have too many victories and accolades for that label, but this season was a true comeback story. Click Aja’s name above to watch the fun Nike ad honoring her season (narrated by actress Sheryl Lee Ralph), and consider tuning in next season.

• Northern Disclosure – a new podcast series about Northern Exposure, one of my all-time favorite TV shows. The podcast is co-hosted by the show’s leads, Janine Turner and Rob Morrow, who talk about each episode and interview fellow cast members and behind-the-scenes creators.
  
  It is not a fine-tuned machine of a podcast, but for true fans of Northern Exposure, it’s a lovely, if slightly bumpy stroll down memory lane. Trivia: I visited the tiny town of Roslyn, Washington, where the series was filmed, in the early 90s when I was traveling across country; it was a blast. (Tip: Like many podcasts, you can also watch it on YouTube and see what hairstyle+color Turner is sporting that week.)

A weird mix of things, I know, but I hope you find something on the list that you enjoy.

The interview before “the world turned upside down”

Deep in my “Saved” podcast list on my Apple Podcast app — the oldest one, at the very bottom – is an episode of Michael Ian Black’s “How to Be Amazing” podcast. Lin-Manuel Miranda was the guest on that May 26, 2015 episode, and I’m pretty sure this was the first time I’d heard an interview with him.

I can’t tell you when I listened to it, but it may have been a year or so later; May 2015 marked the beginning of a very heavy year, and I don’t think Hamilton hit my radar in real time with the rest of the world. When the “How to be Amazing” interview aired that spring, my sister was in and out of the hospital, trying to get a diagnosis for breathing problems; in June 2015, she found out she had Stage 4 cancer, and she died the following May.

She was a theater kid, dancer, choreographer, teacher, arts critic and so much more over the years, and I’ve often thought about how much I wished she could have seen Hamilton. The 10th anniversary made me realize that Hamilton’s rise dovetailed with her final year, something I hadn’t really thought about before.

Back to that “How to Be Amazing” interview: Even though I’m pretty sure Hamilton was already a sensation by the time I listened, the fact that I already knew the end of that story didn’t take a bit of pleasure away from listening to Lin-Manuel Miranda talking about his creation in the “before” days; that was really the charm of it. Though it aired on May 26, the interview may have been recorded months earlier; not sure.

(From here on, I’m taking the easy route and abbreviating Michael Ian Black to MIB and Lin-Manuel Miranda to LMM.)

At one point, MIB asks, “So is there a chance we’ll see an African-American George Washington?” and LMM laughs and says, “You will see an African-American George Washington! We’ve only had African-American George Washingtons! … the cast of Hamilton is overwhelmingly actors of color.”

When you hear MIB’s surprise, you remember that what we now take for granted was a big deal when Hamilton debuted.

The whole interview is, well, amazing. It has become something that I return to when I need my creative spirit rejuvenated; I always come away feeling joyful.

I listened to part of the interview again while writing this post, and this comment from MIB toward the beginning made me laugh:

Absolutely.

The “How to Be Amazing” podcast is no longer around, sadly, and that may be the reason I’m having a hard time sharing the episode from the Apple Podcasts App. It’s available on Spotify here, and you can also listen on Soundcloud if you create an account (it’s worth it).

I hope you enjoy it as much as I have; I love LMM’s “exuberance,” as MIB describes it, their banter is fun and it’s full of reminders that persistence is as much a factor as genius in creating great things (more on that below).

The story of the story

My second Hamilton delight is a book that in part delves into how the words and music of the show came together – I have never enjoyed footnotes more.

I think I may have bought Hamilton: The Revolution for myself for Christmas at some point after it came out in 2016. I’m not that great at summarizing things that I love – perfectionism kicks in – so I’m stealing from the Hachette publishing website description:

“A backstage pass to the groundbreaking, hit musical Hamilton, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Eleven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, including the award-winning libretto, behind-the-scenes photos and interviews, and exclusive footnotes from composer-lyricist-star Lin-Manuel Miranda …

“[The book] gives readers an unprecedented view of both revolutions, from the only two writers able to provide it. Miranda, along with Jeremy McCarter, a cultural critic and theater artist who was involved in the project from its earliest stages — ‘since before this was even a show,’ according to Miranda — traces its development from an improbable performance at the White House to its landmark opening night on Broadway six years later. In addition, Miranda has written more than 200 funny, revealing footnotes for his award-winning libretto, the full text of which is published here.

“Their account features photos by the renowned Frank Ockenfels and veteran Broadway photographer, Joan Marcus; exclusive looks at notebooks and emails; interviews with Questlove, Stephen Sondheim, leading political commentators, and more than 50 people involved with the production; and multiple appearances by President Obama himself.

The book does more than tell the surprising story of how a Broadway musical became a national phenomenon: It demonstrates that America has always been renewed by the brash upstarts and brilliant outsiders, the men and women who don’t throw away their shot.”

I love backstories.

Beyond what you learn from the stories themselves, Hamilton: The Revolution reminds you that the show didn’t flow magically and instantaneously from the creators’ brains onto the page. Those of us who want to create things understand intellectually that a Hamilton-level show takes years and years of work and rework, but it’s awfully easy to look at someone like Lin-Manuel Miranda and say, “That guy is just magic; I could never do that.”

And he is magic, but he also worked really hard with his co-creators before Hamilton became Hamilton. As a writer who tries to spend more time on purely creative projects these days (as opposed to only my day job as a writer and editor), the book was an inspiring reality check. (As mentioned, LMM also has great advice and perspective on this in his “How to Be Amazing” interview.)

The fortunate thing about writing this post to celebrate “Hamilten”? It made me realize that there is a big chunk of the book that I haven’t read yet. It’s one of those that you can dip in and out of when you have a little window of time, but the problem with those books is that they can end up forgotten at the bottom of a pile of novels and other books you read at a faster clip. My copy is now back on my bedtime reading pile.

If you also love reading backstories, especially about creativity and works of art, and if you, like me, are buoyed by LMM’s infectious love of creating (his exuberance), go buy yourself a copy of this book or look for it at the library.

(It’s a very good time to escape into a book that celebrates a musical that celebrates history and music and immigrants, after all.)

The show

My then-teenage daughter and I saw Hamilton on the road two years after its Broadway debut; while it would have been memorable to see the original cast in NYC, I knew that all of the traveling casts were getting rave reviews, so I didn’t think we’d feel we had a “lesser” Hamilton experience.

Still, there was a little part of me that wondered if anything with so much build-up could possibly live up to our expectations.

But the show blew our expectations out of the water, of course, and we were thrilled to at last be in the room where it happened (sorry, not sorry). When the cast came out at the end to take their bows, we felt the rush of what we had just experienced, along with everyone around us. It was pretty magnificent.

Thanks LMM and friends – it has been a fun ride.

Postscript

I’ve never dedicated a post before, but this one is for my sister Viki, the arts educator and eternal theater kid, and her friend Liz, who was a leader and innovator in public school arts education for decades – and who delighted in seeing a local theater kid, Ariana DeBose, go on to appear in Hamilton as “the Bullet.” Colon cancer took my sister and Liz way too young, six years apart, and if there’s any justice in the afterlife, those two are out there collaborating in some kind of theater heaven.

I posted something here that I wrote years ago about a full-circle trip of sorts that began with going to the Jewish Cemetery in Prague and seeing the drawings of children who were imprisoned in the concentration camp Terezin near Prague during World War II. Some of those children were later transported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered; before our visit to Auschwitz, my friend and I had also visited Terezin (though separately).

I am guessing that we both felt that Auschwitz was the place we must go to finish bearing witness to the stories of those innocent people — including the children — whose stories began at Terezin, though I’m not sure we would have put those words to it back then.

Here is the way that 31-year-old me processed what remains one of the most haunting experiences I will ever have; I wrote it later in the summer, so a few weeks removed from that day.

S. and I went to Auschwitz on our last day in Krakow, and it was of course, unspeakable.

We toured Camp I, saw the film, the exhibits of shoes and hair and suitcases, the endless rows of prisoner mug shots, eyes staring out at you, empty, but it was at Birkenau, Camp II, that it all hit home.

We saw how it was all carried out, stood on the ground those trainloads of people stepped out onto … Saw photos taken by the Nazis of the “selection” process that took place right there. Saw and walked the road that the unselected majority walked down toward the gas chambers — told they were going to be allowed to shower.

And finally, you stood next to the ruins of gas chambers #3 and #4 at the end of that road. Having seen a model of the chamber/crematorium at the other camp, you could look at the rubble and see where they were led in, the room where they were told to strip and leave their clothes in a numbered slot (and told to remember the number – a horrible ploy to carry on the lie that they were coming back from their showering) and then the top of what was the chamber. It was so small; it seemed impossible that so many people could be forced into that small space with the showerheads that were never connected to any water supply.

We also went into barracks with mud/dirt floors and bunks three deep. Children’s drawings remained in one. You had to walk through overgrown fields, grass knee-deep, to get to the barracks.

This was no neatly tended antiseptic museum.

Reading this for the first time in many, many years, I thought it was as sparely written as it should be. Everything you saw was hard to take in, much less put adequate words to.

What I did not write down in that journal entry is the thought I have never forgotten that struck me that day as I stood on the ground where the trains rolled in. I knew that anyone with any sense of humanity would feel horror as they stood in that spot, but I also realized that I could not experience the full horror because *I* would not have been put on those trains and sent to those gas chambers if I had been alive back then.

I don’t plan to turn Bright Spot into a place where I discuss the difficult things happening in the world; I believe its original goal of finding bright spots in the world is more important than ever, and I will keep that up.

But this page is also about writing and words and the way they help us process life, and when I found these long-ago words in the midst of seeing my country putting human beings into cages under a tent in the roasting sun of the Everglades, and cruel jokes alluding to alligators menacing immigrants posted to the official White House social media account and those of other elected officials, it hit hard.

We can’t be silent.

My mother, Betty, was dedicated to the art of the hand-written letter, note, or holiday card for most of her 92 years, and it appears that she kept just about every one that was sent to her. I’ve been looking through them slowly but surely and picking out a few to keep.

One Christmas card had very few hand-written words but reminded me of how much you can learn about a person from one small bit of evidence. I couldn’t put my hand on the card this morning, but I remember the only part that matters — under the pre-printed holiday message, there was a woman’s name and in parentheses, “Fresh Market.”

My mother got this card several years after moving from Virginia back to her home state of North Carolina. In Virginia, the Fresh Market near her home was her favorite grocery store; it was small and easy to navigate.

I believe you can get a good sense of the way my mother moved through life by knowing that a woman who worked at her favorite grocery store was sending my mother Christmas cards years after she moved away.

Much later, I figured out that I might have been far more successful academically in the sciences if the teaching had included more storytelling. It wasn't that I didn't like science; I just needed a better way in.

Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015 at the age of 82, was one of the great science and medicine storytellers who could make concepts beyond my experience and background come alive for me. His anecdotes and insights about the human mind and body stayed with me long after I listened to the interviews he gave. And I specifically call out his interviews because for me, there was something gentle yet compelling and powerful about his voice.

I'm passing along links to two interviews Sacks did with Terry Gross for NPR's Fresh Air that I have never forgotten, as well as a third one I had missed about his book Musicophilia.

The first one, about his book The Mind's Eye, is one of my all-time favorite radio interviews (or "podcast episodes," as we usually say now). I think it's especially memorable because Sacks, who wrote so compassionately about the unusual medical challenges he encountered in his patients, talks of his own unusual struggles, including visual migraines, face blindness and later in life, losing his “stereoscopic” (3D) vision and other effects of an aggressive tumor in his eye.

If you love great science storytelling, too, go to the Fresh Air archive and listen to these Oliver Sacks interviews on your next run or commute:

Oliver Sacks: A Neurologist Examines 'The Mind's Eye'

Oliver Sacks: Exploring How Hallucinations Happen

Oliver Sacks: 'Musicophilia' Examines Music in the Mind

You may also enjoy this post about Sacks on one of my favorite blogs, Brainpickings: Oliver Sacks on Storytelling, the Curious Psychology of Writing, and What His Poet Friend Taught Him About the Nature of Creativity.

Reliable delight

This American Life
Episode 754: Spark Bird

I’ve been listening to old episodes of This American Life, the radio show-now-podcast, over the past few years. I often find myself bowled over or amused or moved (or all of those things) and immediately think of specific people I want to send the link to right away. Wanting specific people in my life to experience something I loved is a sure sign of great storytelling for me.

Spark Bird was one of those episodes. This American Life episodes usually consist of several segments that tie to a theme; sometimes I love all segments equally, and other times I have favorite segments.

With this one, there were two stories that were my favorites, but I’ll just describe the one that inspired the title — in the prologue, host Ira Glass interviews a young “birder” named Noah Stryker about his spark bird (“the bird that changed his life”). In a later segment the two go for a walk in the woods, and Strycker shares a pet peeve that plagues his bird-loving soul; I love quirky trivia, so this bit of knowledge delighted me and has stuck with me.

“Don’t Chicken Out,” the other segment I loved, is hilarious and surprising and sweet. Five out of five stars.

I’ll be recommending other This American Life episodes in future posts because (per my subhead above) its archive of hundreds of episodes really is a reliable source of delight.

Here’s where you can listen to Spark Bird:

• The archived episode on This American Life's website (free to listen)

• The episode on the Apple Podcast app, where you have to be a New York Times subscriber to listen, as This American Life is now owned by the NYT. (I’m sure it can be found on Spotify and other podcast apps, but the subscriber issue will still apply.)

• The episode on the New York Times Audio App … you also have to be a subscriber, but if you already have this app and use it often, you may want to go this route.

Cheers to the archivists – of all kinds of things

Who Saves New York’s Lost Signs?
Short (just under 10 minutes) film about David Barnett, co-founder of Noble Signs + the New York Sign Museum
Directed and shot by Joshua Charow (@joshuacharow on Instagram)
Edited by Abraham C. Howard
Story discovered via Instagram

From the Instagram post:

“For the past decade, Barnett and his crew have been rescuing iconic signage whenever a business shuts down. Together, they've built New York City's very first sign museum.”

I love signs, too, so this post caught my eye. I wonder if there was a particular sign that Barnett saw when he was growing up that was his version of a Spark Bird?

If reading this description caught your imagination, I think you’ll consider the 9-plus-minute film worth your time.

You can read more here:

Noble Signs
The New York Sign Museum

On a sunny afternoon in early April 2022, I stood alone in the church sanctuary in North Carolina where I spent countless Sundays over the first 18 years of my life. My mother’s memorial gathering was starting soon, and I was happy to have a few minutes alone in this beautiful place where my family had spent so much time.

My father’s and grandmother’s funerals took place here when I was a little girl, and many years later, I got married here. It’s a lovely space with pews set in a semi-circle, giving it an intimacy I like. But there was something specific I’d wanted to see again before anyone else arrived – the trio of huge round stained-glass windows.

At the back of the church in the balcony — appropriately? — is a window depicting Jesus ascending to heaven. The window on the right side of the sanctuary could have been titled “Jesus the Good Shepherd,” as it shows a gentle scene with Jesus carrying lambs.

But it is the third window showing Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane that has stayed with me for decades. It captures the famous quiet moment of despair – Jesus kneeling and looking up to the skies as two of his disciples huddle almost unnoticed in the background of the stained-glass scene. Even as a child sitting in the sanctuary and looking at the windows as I fidgeted through Sunday services, I was drawn to that window – no doubt because I already understood deep sadness, and that depiction was comforting to me in a way I probably didn’t understand at the time.

My relationship with religion has evolved quite a bit since the years I spent in this place. To use a category I once saw on a dating website, I am “more spiritual than religious.”

But during two of the hardest experiences of my life – being there for the last year of my sister’s life and for the last weeks of my mother’s life – I thought of that Garden of Gethsemane window and the anguished, simple, futile request I knew all too well from my years of Sunday School and Easter services. I can no longer quote the passage word for word, but I believe Jesus’ words were along the lines of “Let this cup pass from me.”

And that is what I wished for at my lowest points as I watched the ends of my sister’s and my mother’s lives play out. I wanted to run away from home. I wanted someone else to step up and take charge. I wanted someone else to make sure everything would be as alright as it could possibly be for my sister and later for my mother.

Those low points were tough to take; you don’t want to be the person who wants to flee the hard times. You want to be the steady, cheerful one. Many years before, a romantic partner had referred to me as “the rock,” and I remember thinking that this was somehow the role I was supposed to play. I also thought – but never said out loud – that it would have been nice to take turns.

When I was struggling, that Gethsemane window reminded me that one of the best-known stories in the world included this very real, not-heroic moment of truth. While I knew logically that it was human to feel the way I was feeling, my memory going back and retrieving that image from my childhood helped bring that message home when I needed it most.

After my mother’s memorial, friends who had driven down for the service from the town where I live now commented on how beautiful the sanctuary was. I told them how much I had always loved the windows, and I pointed to the Gethsemane window and shared a much-abbreviated version of what I’ve written above.

That night, one of those friends sent me this message (edited a little).

Your words about that stained glass in the church have stuck with me. I wonder about the artists who worked on that commission. What did they think about it? Did they get bored of the church work? Or did they know somehow, that someday, a window they installed decades ago would provide some comfort to a woman as she tends to her mother on her way out of this world? And I think that if you are the only person that piece ever spoke to, that's enough. More than enough. Because in its own way, it's really a supernatural thing for some pretty glass to do.

It is.

I looked up the word supernatural, and an Oxford dictionary definition describes it as something “attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.”

And being there for each other, in any way we can manage on any given day, even when what we really want to do is run away (Let this cup pass …) is, it seems to me, a supernatural thing for a human to do. We just need to give ourselves some grace and allow ourselves to believe it.

I wrote this story a couple of years ago and shared it on LinkedIn; I wanted to share it here and add an update on what happened after I posted it.

March 2023

I recently came across a business card I had saved for many years for sentimental reasons.

I now have it in a spot where I see it often. I want to be reminded of the story that goes with that simple black-and-white card with "Emily J. Friedrich" in the center.

In the spring of my junior year of college, I was accepted into a summer program on political journalism in Washington, DC. The program would consist of an internship and two classes at Georgetown University.

The rub? We had to find our own internship.

Chasing childhood dreams

My daughter is getting ready to graduate from college, and as we talk about her job search, I’ve been thinking back to the pre-Internet days of searching for internships and jobs. Now that there are so many ways to look for opportunities across the world – much less across a couple of state lines, as I was doing that spring – I feel a bit of awe for the old-school hoops we jumped through back then.

I don’t remember everything I did in my search for an internship. I do remember the decision that matters: I took a chance and called the Time-Life Washington bureau.

When I was growing up, we had huge coffee table books with images from LIFE magazine, and I leafed through them over and over. I loved newspapers, but I had a special place in my heart for news magazines; images were as powerful as the words for me (and sometimes more powerful), and they got more play in magazines.

Working for the company that had brought this magic into my house was a dream.

Creating a place

When I called that Washington bureau number, I asked the person who answered if they had internship programs. Instead of saying yes or no, the receptionist sent my call to someone else.

That someone else was Emily J. Friedrich.

I had no idea who she was or what she did in the bureau, but I explained why I had called.

“We don’t have internships,” she said, and 21-year-old me probably thought that would be that.

But it wasn’t. If I was going to be in the area any time soon, she said, I should let her know. Maybe I could come by and visit the bureau?

I don’t know if I had the presence of mind to immediately say, “Oh, I will be there soon,” or if I called her back soon after to say so. I do know that there was no doubt in my mind that I would be driving from Winston-Salem to Washington as soon as my class schedule and Emily Friedrich’s schedule dovetailed. There was no way I was letting this chance pass me by; even if it led nowhere, I would get to see the TIME-Life bureau!

Soon after my cold call, I was in Washington, nervously finding my way to a very nice building on Connecticut Avenue to meet Emily, who, as it turned out, worked on the business/admin side of things at the bureau. She had short, stylish hair, wore glasses and had a warm smile that put my jittery self at ease.

By the end of our conversation, she had suggested that maybe working as a summer newsdesk assistant for TIME would be acceptable for my internship requirement, adding that it would be paid work.

I couldn’t believe my good fortune (I had encountered very few paid internships during college), and I may have floated back to North Carolina.

Behind the scenes

My summer journalism program approved the work at the bureau (no surprise), and while I spent the summer doing mostly intern-level things, I had some opportunities to help with research and to write short items that ended up in TIME. As a perk, they sent me to the Ford’s Theater Gala (which yielded a tiny item), and I brought my sister along as my date.

But most of all, I had a chance to see how the magazines, especially TIME, came together each week, and to get to know the people behind the stories, some of whom were famous in the journalism world.

And I got to know Emily and others on the admin side of the bureau and soon came to appreciate the fact that without them, the journalists could not put out any magazines.

I stayed in touch with Emily and others in the bureau after I went back to college for my final year. After working for a newspaper in North Carolina for two years, I decided to join a friend and move to Washington, a place that I’d become fond of through two summers there. We moved without jobs (brave or stupid, depending on how you look at it), and when I was looking for temporary work to pay the rent, my friends at the Time-Life bureau gave me part-time work there. It was so nice to be in a familiar place with people I knew while I was getting the final pieces of my new life in DC to fall into place.

It all began with Emily taking a cold call from young me and creating an opportunity where one had not existed – and giving me the chance to learn an important lesson about chutzpah. (When someone asks if you’re going to be in the area, you make sure you’re in the area asap.)

Emily died far too early due to cancer, but her kindness has lived on for me and has reminded me to pay that kindness forward in any way I can.

As my daughter graduates and heads out into the work world, I can only hope that someone will be her Emily J. Friedrich.

Postscript: Reconnecting with my second “Emily”

A few months after I posted this story, another favorite mentor from TIME, Inc. came across it and got in touch with me. She emailed to say that she was planning a reunion for former Washington bureau people and had looked up my name so she could invite me (which was an honor given that I was never a long-term employee).

I couldn’t go to the reunion, but we exchanged messages, and she told me she had shared this piece about Emily with TIME, Inc. people who had known her, as well as some of Emily’s family members. What a gift that was.

And it was a gift to be back in touch with her; like Emily, she worked on the “running things” side of the bureau, and like Emily, she was loved and respected and considered indispensable. (She also did some writing and reporting.)

It was this kind mentor who helped me get a temporary job at the bureau when I quit my job and moved to Washington a couple of years after graduation.

I worked in Washington for about five years, and we stayed in touch even after I moved overseas. I’m not sure when we lost contact, but after LinkedIn came along, I searched for her, but none of the possible profiles seemed active.

I’m so glad that a business card I held onto for decades led me to write about Emily and reconnect with the wonderful woman who succeeded her as a kind role model for me all those years ago.

And one more note: My daughter did indeed find some Emily J. Friedrichs after she graduated from college in 2023.

After experiencing the familiar “You must have X number of years of experience” brick wall while job-hunting, she applied for a job at Tulane University in New Orleans. They offered her a job, seeing good things in the experience she had gotten through working at her university while she was in school.

In August, she will mark her second year at Tulane, and all along the way, there have been managers, mentors and colleagues who have very much embodied the kindness of Emily.

What trips me up is usually the feeling that I can’t find the right words to capture why I loved something. Given how often that has kept me from following through, I’m going to try to let my favorite things lists fly without any perfect descriptions. If one of these intrigues you and I didn’t give you quite enough to go on, I hope you’ll do a little exploring on your own and find out more.

***

As 2024 came to a close, I kept thinking of things that had crossed my path and made life better (or, in the spirit of this Substack, brighter). As 2025 has careened forward, I’ve found myself in need of even more bright spots and I’ve added a few to the list. I hope something below resonates with you.

• Meditations for Mortals, a follow-up to Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, the book I recommended here last year.
  

  

  In Four Thousand Weeks, writer Oliver Burkeman reminded us that our time on the planet is finite, and we should not spend so much of it obsessed with being productive.
  
  Truly productivity-obsessed readers may have come away from Four Thousand Weeks with an uneasy feeling – unable to wrap their heads around how they can get anything done if they became lackadaisical about their to-do lists, even though the book does include specific advice.
  
  I think Meditations for Mortals is Burkeman’s answer to those who need more detail on how to get the important things done vs. getting more stuff done – or put another way, how to put your most valuable brain space toward enjoying your life. I love Burkeman’s vibe and wisdom and humor, and I keep both of these books close by; they’re both heavily flagged with passages I want to return to when I need a reminder about finding that balance.

• Historian Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” –reflections on political events and how they connect to history.

  Her weekly politics chats via Facebook Live sessions (usually at 4 pm Eastern on Tuesdays) are also a great source of perspective and information. She is wise and real and delightful, and it’s kind of a joy in and of itself to witness her love of history – and history rabbit holes.

  

  
  She also offers an audio version, reading her letters and posting them to the usual podcast apps. Here’s the Apple Podcast link.
  

• Tara Brach’s podcast episodes/meditations/talks.
  
  Brach is a writer and meditation teacher I discovered when I found one of her books among my sister’s things. In addition to being well-known in the meditation field, she has an interesting academic background – a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, with her dissertation looking at meditation as a therapeutic modality in treating addiction.
  
  I am not a meditator, and I’m not all that well-versed in anything in that realm (though I would like to get into even a basic meditation habit because I think it’s healthy to sit still and rest your brain).
  

  Despite my lack of knowledge, I love Brach’s podcast and feel confident recommending it to other non-meditators in need of a few minutes of thoughtful, reflection.
  
  Brach’s is not a podcast in the usual sense; each one is a recording of a talk or guided meditation she has done in person at some point. She tells jokes here and there and doesn’t take herself too seriously; some of the talks touch on how to deal with hard things, including hard things going on in the world, but never in a preachy way. For me, Brach is a tonic for the soul (that sounds sort of precious but isn’t meant to be). Scroll through the descriptions and find one that resonates – even if it still might seem too “Zen” for you — and give it a try. She is lovely, so take a leap.
  
  Her website is here, and the podcast is here.
  

• I have one last recommendation that’s easy - just go outside.

  
  But there’s a second part of this that makes it more powerful: Once you get outside, pay close attention to things you might usually walk by and not notice.
  
  Blooms (up-close) and cool architectural details and people and animals and things you may spot on the sidewalk – long-ago kid handprints, painted names (during COVID, I found that the name of my best friend who died in 2008 is paint-scrawled on a sidewalk a few blocks from my house), and lost stuffed animals.
  
  In a post last July about the importance of small joys in stressful times, I mentioned how much happiness I get from walking in my neighborhood (and beyond when I have time). At the beginning of this year, I decided I’d commit to walking at least a mile a day outside. I have a treadmill, but it felt important to specify the outside part since I work from home and am inside at a computer all day; the treadmill could be back-up only.
  
  I’m terrible about keeping New Year’s-ish resolutions, but this one has taken hold. Trying to keep my streak going has propelled me out of the house on many days when I was feeling lazy or sluggish. I’ve allowed myself some leeway on the handful of days when I couldn’t make it work (one evening, it poured buckets for hours) or when I was outside doing other kinds of exercise with friends.
  
  But on about 101 days of 2025, I’ve been outside for those one-plus-mile walks, taking in the changing seasons (we finally got snow this year) and blooms and favorite houses (and favorite stone walls).

  
  

  
  These walks can cure whatever might be ailing me and often conjure up good memories of something I mentioned in that post last July – the “cabin fever” walks I took daily with my daughter during that weird, but somehow sense-heightened COVID time when we were hunkering down together after her university sent everyone home. That time with her walking the neighborhood was a big silver lining of a life-changing, loss-filled part of history.

I hope something on this list ends up being a favorite thing for you, too; please feel free to share some of your favorite things in the comments.

In August 2011, I wrote a post about a children’s book that came out of tragic events in World War II Czechoslovakia. The original post appeared on “Lost in a Book,” the blog my daughter and I created when she was young.

The story has recently resurfaced in an inspiring, unexpected way, and I decided to update my original post and share it here.

I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-44

~ By the children

The Butterfly

The last, the very last,

So richly, brightly, dazzingly yellow

Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing

against a white stone.

Such, such a yellow

Is carried lightly ‘way up high

It went away I’m sure because it wished to

kiss the world goodbye

For seven weeks, I’ve lived in here,

Penned up inside this ghetto

But I have found my people here.

The dandelions call to me

And the white chestnut candles in the court.

Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.

Butterflies don’t live in here,

In the ghetto.

~ Pavel Friedman, 4.6.1942

The story of the children of Terezin, like the story told by Anne Frank in her diary, should be shared over and over again so that we don’t forget.

In 1995, I had a chance to work as an editor in the beautiful city of Prague in what is now the Czech Republic. I had many adventures and new experiences there; this was my first time living in a place where I didn’t speak the language, and I had so much to learn on many levels.

The most memorable of my learning experiences was a history trip I took over the course of my 20 months living in Prague. In the end – a surprise ending – this trip took me to four cities in three countries, and it ended with a book placed in my hands in my hometown in North Carolina.

Prague, Czech Republic

As I was getting acquainted with Prague in the winter of 1995, I visited the Jewish quarter and its otherworldly cemetery, where a crowd of teetering gravestones lean into each other, as if each is trying to nudge the others aside and claim a larger stake of the crowded space. I climbed narrow stairs to the second floor of the Pinkas Synagogue and found myself in rooms full of children’s drawings very like the ones my daughter would make years later. There were poems and prose as well – far more sad than any words my girl would write.

These words and pictures, I learned, were created by the children who were rounded up with their families during World War II and imprisoned at Terezin, a concentration camp near Prague. Called Theresienstadt by the Nazis, it served as a labor camp and way station for approximately 140,000 Jewish men, women and children, many of whom who were eventually transported to Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

Many others died at Terezin – from beatings, mistreatment, starvation or the diseases that spread quickly in the inhumane living conditions. (For background on Terezin that is far better than what I can provide, visit the Holocaust Encyclopedia page on the Web site of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and put “Terezin” in the search field.)

The Pinkas Synagogue exhibition told the story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, an artist sent to Terezin along with her husband. She saw to it that hundreds of children at Terezin could escape the misery of life at the camp through clandestine art lessons.

Terezin, Czech Republic

The children and their art stayed with me, and I later made a day trip to Terezin by train with a friend so I could see for myself where the haunting artwork had been created.

After walking around the grounds and trying to imagine what it had been like, we went through the exhibits, which included videos of survivors talking about their time in the camp. One was especially poignant and chilling.

The story the Nazis had spun for the world from the beginning was that they were building a special city at Terezin for certain “protected” classes of Jews. Under pressure from the International Red Cross, the Nazis agreed to allow its representatives to visit Terezin. The prisoners were pressed into service to pull off a masterful public relations coup for their captors.

First, they were put to work on a beautification effort ahead of the visit; then, when the Red Cross representatives arrived, the men, women and children put on an elaborate show designed to convince the visitors of their pleasant lives at Terezin. The ruse worked, and the Red Cross went away satisfied. The Nazis also created a related propaganda film that included footage of the visit, but they never released it.

A Terezin survivor featured in the museum exhibits recalled a detail about that day that I will never forget: ice cream was brought in for the day as part of the charade, but when the visitors left, it was whisked away. Even the ice cream was a prop, never intended for the enjoyment of the children of Terezin.

(You can read more about the Red Cross visit on the Web site of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.)

Auschwitz and Birkenau – Krakow, Poland

Months later, I traveled to Krakow on an overnight train with another friend who also felt led to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. We saw the infamous iron gate leading to the red brick buildings of Auschwitz, the heart-breaking collection of shoes and belongings and the harrowing faces of prisoner after prisoner staring out from photographs lining the corridors.

Later, we crossed to the desolate, overgrown fields of Birkenau and stood on the spot where the transports had rolled in, their passengers having no idea that in a few moments they would be shuffled down the tracks to the gas chambers or chosen to join the laborers. Standing in that spot was overwhelming in a way I will never be able to describe. This was the place where a miserable journey ended for many of the children of Terezin, as well as their art teacher. When her husband was selected for transport to Auschwitz in the fall of 1944, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis volunteered to go as well; she died in the gas chambers at Birkenau several days later.

According to the web site of the Jewish museum of Prague, “before being deported to Auschwitz, Friedl Dicker filled two suitcases with about 4,500 children’s drawings and put them in a secret place; immediately after the war, they were recovered and handed over to the Jewish Museum in Prague.

“These drawings are a poignant reminder of the tragic fate of Bohemian and Moravian Jews during the Second World War. Only a few of the Terezín children survived; the vast majority were deported to Auschwitz where they were exterminated. In many cases, these pictures are all that is left to commemorate their lives. Without them, their names would be remain forgotten.”

Fayetteville, North Carolina

I thought that the trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau had taken me to the end of the story, but in a twist that still amazes me, the ending came in the place where I spent my childhood.

I moved back to the United States in 1996, and not long after, I heard from a family friend in Fayetteville, my hometown in North Carolina. She and a friend organized estate sales, and she told me she had come across something in her work that I might be interested in; I was taken aback when I saw what she had set aside for me. Both the simple art on the cover of the worn picture book and the word “Terezin” jumped out at me.

What are the chances that a book collecting the words and pictures of Terezin’s children would make its way into my hands in my hometown, so far away from the Czech Republic?

I believe that my copy of I Never Saw Another Butterfly may be the original version published in 1959 in Czechoslovakia; in researching online, I’ve found that an expanded second edition was created in 1993 by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and published by Schocken Books; it features a foreword by Chaim Potok and an afterword by former Czech President and acclaimed writer and activist Vaclav Havel. It appears to be available online from Random House.

I realize that this is not a picture book you will want to run out and buy for your very young children, but I do hope you will share the story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and the brave children of Terezin with them when they are older.

2025 update: A new chapter

In late 2024, a Facebook post caught my eye. A close family friend who did many theater productions with my sister decades ago in Fayetteville shared the latest show that he and his wife were involved in at Studio 1, a community theater in Burlington, NC. The title? “I Never Saw Another Butterfly.”

I knew from the research for my original blog post in 2011 that there had been a theater production based on the story, but I never expected to see a staging of it just an hour down the road – and to have close friends in the cast made it all the more remarkable. The children and their art just keep coming back into my life.

I’m going to see the play on Sunday, and to make things even more full-circle, the friend I traveled to Auschwitz-Birkenau with back in the mid-90s will be coming, too.

I may share an update after seeing the production, but regardless, I hope you’ll take this opportunity to read more about the story of Terezin via the links I shared above; if you feel led to, I hope you’ll share the story of the brave adults and children who used art to get through during their time at Terezin.

We need to remember the price of hate now more than ever.

A few years ago, I began a new tradition for my late November birthday: Going to my favorite local bookstore, Quail Ridge Books, and meandering around for an hour or more.

It feels luxurious to sit down and leaf through any book that catches my eye. I pull big coffee table books off the shelves and take in their showy design and luxurious printing – enjoying them for a few minutes with the full knowledge that in the end, they will go back on the shelves instead of home with me (I need to spend more time looking through the ones I already have).

At the end of my wandering, I usually pick out a birthday gift for myself.

A few years back, I found my best birthday gift yet – Christmas Days, a collection of short stories, recipes and essays from writer Jeanette Winterson. I took it home and fell in love with it.

I get it out every November/December and begin reading the stories and essays again. The stories run the gamut from whimsical to spooky to poignant, but most have at least a hint of magic or the supernatural. Reading them is one of my very favorite holiday traditions.

The essays always seem to speak to what I’m feeling as winter comes on, and I especially appreciate what she writes about how to go into the New Year. I find that I need to hear her words of wisdom again as each year wraps up.

Picking up Christmas Days again each holiday feels a little magical, which is a real gift during a time when we need as much magic as we can get.

I've given the book to several friends since stumbling across it, and I wanted to recommend it here while there’s still a little holiday time for you to jump in and read Winterson’s creations (and try her recipes).

I’m sharing an outtake from her introduction and a few review blurbs below:

I wish you magic during the holidays and into the New Year.

.

August 2015

Last weekend, I was on a dance floor for the first time in years.

I was at a close friend’s 50th birthday bash, dancing to music played by a cover band we had loved 25-plus years before.

A few of us had been among the band’s first fans – there for their earliest performances in the late 80s in the college town where we were struggling to get used to being employed college graduates.

Back then, we loved the band because they were immensely talented musicians; because they were hot (of course); and because they could pull off playing an odd, excellent mix of covers with ease. Elvis Costello, Squeeze, Earth, Wind and Fire, Bruce Springsteen and the Jackson Five are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. We mostly went to hear them play at an upstairs bar called La Terazza, where you could feel the floor shaking underneath you as they reeled from one song to the next until the bar closed.

They were serious musicians who worked on other ventures on their own, and a few years after starting their bread-winning cover band, their non-cover band got a recording contract. It led to a lot of respect and a bit of fame, if not a huge fortune.

Many years later, they started doing their cover band thing again here and there in addition to whatever else they were doing to make a living. When the time came for my friend’s milestone birthday, they were available to make us dance into the early morning hours again.

***

2015 looked a little different on the dance floor than 1989, no doubt. I’m sure that if we had invited our kids to the party, they might have posted videos or photos of us with hashtags along the lines of #groovymiddleagedpeopletrytodance.

But groovy or not, what I felt on the dance floor along with the nostalgia was a bit of awe and a lot of grace. Around me was a network of people not unlike a family tree — and our connections to each other were a bit like the rings you see when you cut down a tree.

There was that original small ring of close friends I danced with in the dive bar 25 years ago. Then there was another layer of people I got to know through those friends over the course of my 20s.

Then there was another circle of acquaintances I don’t know well, but feel connected to nevertheless because I know they are important in the lives of my old friends.

And finally there was another tiny circle — the older brother and sister of my friend the birthday girl, who I’ve been able to spend pockets of time with over the decades of our friendship.

***

At the end of the night, the band played a song in honor of my friend – a song that they had never played back in the day because we were all 20-something and ageless and timeless then.

We’ve been through

Some things together

With trunks of memories

Still to come

We found things to do

In stormy weather

Long may you run.

Long may you run.

Long may you run.

Although these changes

Have come

With your chrome heart shining

In the sun

Long may you run.

As they played the song, I ended up on the dance floor in a cluster with the birthday girl and two of her friends from those outer rings on the family tree. Spontaneously, one of them grabbed the hand of the friend next to her and soon all four of us had done the same, making a circle as if we were small children again.

At this age, I don’t see gestures like this among friends too often, and it was a lovely thing — sparked by nostalgia and music and the things the women in that circle had been to each other in varying combinations over many, many years.

***

Later, after the band finished loading up, they lingered with a small group of us from the dive bar days. This time, we talked about our kids – or in one case, beloved dogs. I thought later that the band had surely come to feel like a family of sorts to each other, too.

***

In the middle of a hard summer, that night was a powerful reminder of just how large my family is at age 50.

There is my given family, as well as the families I have been fortunate enough to gather over the years — the one I was on the dance floor with last week; my best friend from third grade on, who died in 2008 but will always be a powerful part of my life; the other friends I grew up with in my earliest years, riding bikes and playing Kick the Can after dark; the high school friends and college roommates I go on long weekend trips with once a year (as well as other high school and college friends I stay in touch with); the crowd I ran with in my 20-something days in Washington, DC; friends from my time in Prague in my early thirties; and friends I made in my late 30s and into my 40s while navigating marriage, divorce and parenthood.

As I write this, I’m sitting on the porch of one of my dearest high school friends (we bonded instantly in ninth-grade health class), enjoying some much-needed solo time and the peace and quiet of her home in the mountains.

I am listening to crickets and having a beer and enjoying some much-needed solo time while she and her husband are treating my daughter to a picnic at the pool with their two daughters. The three girls have never lived in the same town, but they have known each other all of their lives, and I can only hope that like my friend and me, they will be family to each other for decades to come.

I took two of the girls to Carl Sandburg’s home in Flat Rock, NC, today, and our guide, an earnest college intern, took great pleasure in sharing Sandburg’s idea of a good life:

“ … to be out of jail … to eat regular … to get what I write printed … a little love at home and a little nice affection hither and yon over the American landscape … [and] to sing every day.”

For my daughter, who is already a writer as well as a lover of music, I would wish all of these things (that first one is a given, of course) and a family as big and big-hearted as mine.

Postscript, Summer 2016: When I wrote this a year ago, I had no idea just how much this idea of “family” – those we gather around us and not just those we are born with connections to – would take on more and deeper meaning than I would ever have imagined. There will now have to be another post, a ‘Family, Part 2,’ one day.

On November 13, 1962, my mother wrote a letter to her mother from a hospital room. She was recovering from emergency surgery that saved her life after she was rushed to the ER.

That surgery was necessary because my mother had an ectopic pregnancy. In case that term isn’t familiar, I’ll include a definition from the Mayo Clinic’s website:

“An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside the main cavity of the uterus. … An ectopic pregnancy can't proceed normally. The fertilized egg can't survive, and the growing tissue may cause life-threatening bleeding, if left untreated.”

That’s exactly what was happening with my mother in November 1962: life-threatening bleeding. We’d talked about the surgery a few times, but I had never seen this letter until a few months ago, when I was sorting through the correspondence she left behind when she died.

“I guess I’m better,” she wrote to my grandmother. “I’m still having the pains in my chest from my diaphragm up, but they say that is caused by some of that dried blood being absorbed into the tissues. (They removed 1-1/2 pints of blood from my abdominal cavity.) The incision is healing fine. They removed the clamps yesterday. I can move around fine except that I feel so bad with those chest pains that I’m doing nothing but lying here. I still don’t know when I’ll go home – I’ve got to feel a lot better before I do.”

She needed to feel a lot better in part because she had three children waiting for her at home: my two brothers (8 and 9 years old) and my sister (6 years old). My father was handling things with help from his mother, friends and neighbors so he could work and spend time at the hospital, where she stayed for at least a week.

Before closing her letter to my grandmother, my mother reassured her.

“Don’t worry about me,” she wrote. “I couldn’t be in better hands. Dr. G____ did the operation, and he and Dr. M_____ and Dr. D____ have looked out for me since.”

In more normal, sane times, I would not be so struck by this part of my mother’s letter. But now we are living in a time when women who show up at a hospital with pregnancy complications cannot count on their doctors’ response to be immediate and based entirely on their education and experience. In some states, doctors are now forced to stop and consider restrictive abortion laws written by politicians.

History repeats

Americans need to understand the price being paid for these laws, and firsthand stories are a powerful way to communicate that, so I’m sharing my family’s story.

The availability of abortion care — that is what it’s called, no matter how the pregnancy ends – had the most profound of impacts on my life.

I am here because my mother was in the “good hands” of those skilled doctors who were free to treat her without hesitation. A little over two years after her painful recovery, she gave birth to me.

A little over 40 years later, in December 2004, I found out I was pregnant for the fifth time. My then-husband and I had had a healthy, wonderful daughter in 2001, and I then had two miscarriages. I was apparently up against two challenges – “advanced maternal age” (anything after 35, I believe) and the overactive thyroid disease that began while I was pregnant with my daughter.

I went to a specialist OB after the second miscarriage, and she said there was no reason not to keep trying. Getting pregnant was not an issue for me; after our conversation, I got pregnant again, miscarried again (#3), and then got pregnant again. Two of these three pregnancies did not require any procedural intervention; one required a D&E (dilation and extraction), a procedure that has been denied or delayed in some states due to abortion laws.

The December 2004 pregnancy took a much more serious turn. I summed it up in an email to a friend:

“Early last week, I found out I was pregnant, and within a day, I was doubled over in pain. They suspected an ectopic pregnancy and did various tests over a couple of days' time. By Wednesday night, they were speeding me into laparoscopic surgery – they found that I had been bleeding and were a little taken aback to find out that scar tissue from my C-section had fused my uterus to my abdominal wall. Once they figured out how to deal with that problem, they were able to confirm that it was an ectopic pregnancy and take care of things, so I feel very, very lucky.”

Taking care of things meant losing a Fallopian tube; they tried to save it as they dealt with removing the tissue that had implanted in the wrong place, but the tube was too compromised, and I was bleeding too much.

As with my mother’s ectopic pregnancy decades before, the doctor used a dramatic visual description to convey how much blood there had been, much like my mother’s doctors had told her about the pint and a half in 1962.
I have forgotten what the description was in my case, but I get why they were so descriptive:  They wanted me to understand how serious the situation had been.

It worked. I came away feeling lucky despite a fourth miscarriage and a now-compromised reproductive system.

I did not have another child. My marriage ended the following year for unrelated reasons, and I have always chosen to focus on our daughter and the joy she has brought rather than those miscarriages.

Votes = real-world, sometimes personal consequences

In thinking about how to write about how this history plays into my current outrage, a weird image came to mind: The scenes in the movie “Back to the Future” where Michael J. Fox’s character looks at his family photo and sees himself and his sister begin to fade away.

Had my mother not gotten the care she needed, both of us could have faded from our family photos; my three siblings would have been left without a mother — and since my father, following in the footsteps of his brother and father, began having heart attacks in the late 60s and died in 1972, they would have been left without parents as teenagers.

My ectopic pregnancy had not reached as “emergent” a situation as my mother’s, but I, too, was in a situation that could have gone terribly wrong if doctors had to stand around and debate what care they could offer me. If today’s laws were in place back then and I was living in the wrong state, I may have faded from my daughter’s family photos.

She was three back then, and she is 23 now. Should she decide to have children in the future, the reality is that she will be risking her life; as I know all too well, miscarriages are common, and if you can’t be sure you will get the care you need if you have one, you are rolling the dice.

If the politicians who put us in this Handmaid’s Tale situation are not held to account by voters, I will tell my daughter to look into moving to a country where women have full rights before having a child (easier said than done).

I believe we are where we are because people who voted for Donald Trump and other politicians with these views have not stopped to think about what their vote may mean for the people in their lives. Do you have family members or friends who may be having children in the coming years?

If so, you need to come to terms with the fact that a vote for the politicians who are taking women’s rights away may end up hitting very close to home in the years to come.

Don’t risk being haunted by the life or death or serious medical fallout that may result from your vote.

Support women. Respect women. Value women’s lives.

And vote for candidates who do the same.

When I was growing up, our family had loyalty to one “service station,” as they were called then. The Union 76 station on Bragg Boulevard in Fayetteville, North Carolina, was owned by Dixon McLeod, who was co-captain of the football team, player of the year, and generally a “big man on campus” when he and my father were in high school together in the early 1940s.

My father died when I was 7, and most of my memories of going to the Union 76 involved my mother. After my father was gone, I’m sure my mother relied on Mr. McLeod for all car-related questions; she trusted him completely.

I loved his raspy voice and the fact that he knew my dad when he was young. I remember the Union 76 insignia on Mr. McLeod’s shirts, the smell of the motor oil, and the delight of getting an orange "push-up" from his ice cream cooler.

My mother always had a lot on her plate, and yet she always found time to write a note, help a friend, and express her gratitude. It doesn’t surprise me at all that she took time to write a note to “the home office” giving kudos to Dixon McLeod and his Union 76 station.

I appreciate the fact that they wrote her back, and that she hung onto their letter so I would stumble on it all these years later and remember those visits to a kind man who did his part in helping to look after the family my father had had to leave too soon.

.

In some cases, I can remember where I was when I listened; I believe that’s an extraordinary sign of the power of the experience. In most cases, I’ve gone back and listened again quite a few times; now there is a Fresh Air podcast app, but many of these favorites go so far back I have to track them down in the website archive and listen that way.

A chef story

Today’s all-time favorite interview recommendation is “Grant Achatz: The Chef Who Couldn't Taste,” which aired on March 3, 2011. The intro line for the episode was this: “Two years after opening his award-winning Chicago restaurant Alinea, chef Grant Achatz was diagnosed with tongue cancer.”

I bet that one line was enough to suck me in. I am not a foodie, I am a pedestrian cook with zero instincts, and even if I had all the money in the world to spend in Michelin-starred restaurants, I probably would not choose to spent my money that way.

So I am not the natural audience for an interview with a chef who has been known for doing a lot of crazy (some might say pretentious) things with food. But a chef who has lost his sense of taste to cancer? How cruel is that? And what happened?

The story behind how he dealt with this medical and professional challenge was compelling, and Achatz also drew this non-foodie into his fascination with creating unique experiences with food that would play on far more than just your sense of taste.

I loved it.

Circling back

The third season of The Bear dropped in June, and it featured quite a few real-life famous chefs, including the one whose story drew me in 13 years before.

My daughter and I live many miles apart, but we have a tradition of “co-watching” episodes of shows we both love. We watch in our own cities and then Face-Time afterward to talk about the episode; with The Bear, there is always plenty to talk about.

We did the same with the newest season of The Bear. When it began to dawn on me that Achatz, a Chicago chef, was likely to be one of the celebrity chefs making a cameo, I told her the story of this interview I had listened to all those years ago and pointed out Achatz.

I hope her takeaway was that great stories and human drama have long mileage, and sometimes they circle back to you in unexpected ways … and in this case via a TV drama* with stories you won’t soon forget.

Listen to the Grant Achatz interview here; you can also read the transcript at that link.

Postscript: Why the asterisks after TV drama? I’m still annoyed that the people who run the Emmys have miscategorized The Bear as a comedy ever since it landed. It makes zero sense, and when it comes to creative work, I guess I can’t let nonsense go. To all the great comedies that never had a chance to win your category the first year The Bear came out: I see you!

Wintering by Katherine May looks at literal and figurative winters and how they can heal and sustain us.

It is the second of four books I’m recommending here that fall into a category I’d describe (not as eloquently as I’d like) as “books about finding the good things in hard things.”

Like Four Thousand Weeks, the first of these books I wrote about here, I found Wintering through an On Being podcast interview. After hearing host Krista Tippett talk about the book with author Katherine May, I suggested Wintering for my bookclub, thinking it would be an especially helpful read after two years of navigating COVID as well as the big life events and stresses that come our way in any year.

We scheduled it for our January get-together, thinking that we should read about ‘wintering’ during winter; we had no way of knowing that we’d be reading the book during an endless stretch of 70-degree weather that closed out 2021 in North Carolina.

Weather aside, on the January night that we gathered to talk about the book in my friend’s backyard, I was experiencing a very personal winter; my mother (who I was extraordinarily close to) had just begun Hospice care, and talking about this particular book with these women was just what I needed.

I loved Katherine May’s gentle words, her story of discovering the power of winter, and her forays into winter’s cultural history and importance.

Here is her description of those times when grief or illness or any other difficult thing comes along and thrusts you into a parallel universe:

There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere Else is where ghosts live, concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world. Somewhere Else exists at a delay, so that you can't quite keep pace. Perhaps I was already teetering on the brink of Somewhere Else anyway; but now I fell through, as simply and discreetly as dust sifting between the floorboards. I was surprised to find that I felt at home there.

Winter had begun.

During the On Being interview, Krista Tippett asked May to read a couple of passages that were favorites of hers. Here is the first of those (I’m including Tippett’s lead-in because I agree with her words about the book having a meditative quality):

Tippett: I’d love to hear you read a bit of your book. It really does read, in places, like a meditation. It’s a very lovely, restful, retreating experience.

May: No problem.

“A surprising cluster of novels and fairytales are set in the snow. Our knowledge of winter is a fragment of childhood, almost innate. All the careful preparations that animals make to endure the cold, foodless months; hibernation and migration, deciduous trees dropping leaves. This is no accident. The changes that take place in winter are a kind of alchemy, an enchantment performed by ordinary creatures to survive. Dormice laying on fat to hibernate, swallows navigating to South Africa, trees blazing out the final weeks of autumn. It is all very well to survive the abundant months of spring and summer, but in winter, we witness the full glory of nature’s flourishing in lean times.

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

“It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting — is a radical act now, but it’s essential. ”

The winter metaphor resonated for me, and I appreciated the idea of seeing winters (the literal one and the ones that can hit any time of year) as a positive, purposeful time of slowing down, reflecting, and replenishing your energy.

Here is the second passage Tippett asked May to read:

“I’m beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life: a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savored. I’d never dream of suggesting that we should wallow in misery or shrink from doing everything we can to alleviate it, but I do think it’s instructive. After all, unhappiness has a function: it tells us that something is going wrong. There will be moments when we’re riding high and moments when we can’t bear to get out of bed. Both are normal. Both in fact require a little perspective.

“Sometimes the best response to our howls of anguish is the honest one. We need friends who wince along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom, and who allow us to be weak for a while, while we’re finding our feet again. We need people who acknowledge that we can’t always hang on. That sometimes everything breaks. Short of that, we need to perform those functions for ourselves: to give ourselves a break when we need it and to be kind, to find our own grit in our own time.”

I highly recommend Wintering if you need a thoughtful take on (as May puts it) “the power of rest and retreat in difficult times.”

A few end notes:

May followed this book with Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Age of Anxiety, and I recommend it, too.

I recommend the audio versions of her books, too; the narrator Rebecca Lee has a calming, inviting voice that matches the material well.

May herself has a wonderful voice, and you can see what I mean if you listen to the On Being interview and Katherine May’s podcast, How We Live Now.

Four powerful books crossed my path during a time when bad news was rolling through the world at large and my world. These books gave me new ways to look at sadness and loss and fear and overwhelm about politics and divisiveness. All deal with the idea of finding beauty and saving graces during dark times or hard things — and in some cases, finding good things in them.

Writing about all four in one sitting would make for a very long post, so I’m taking them one by one.

I’ve struggled to sum up Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman in conversation with friends, but I’m going to take another crack at it. Burkeman recommends that we look at what is usually a terrifying concept – our limited time on the planet – and let it remind us that hyper-focusing on productivity is a waste of our perfectly good, limited days. (The title refers to the number of weeks you will log if you live to be 80.)

How could a book that focuses on our “finitude” be uplifting and life-changing? It does sound like a hard sell, but I believe most people will walk away from Four Thousand Weeks feeling inspired and thoughtful about how they spend their days.

This book is a great one for listening; Burkeman reads it, and he has such an engaging, likable voice that I’ve listened to the book twice. I first learned about Four Thousand Weeks via that pleasant voice when I heard Krista Tippett interview Burkeman about the book on her podcast “On Being.” He seems compelling and likable (as is Tippett, of course), and I was drawn in by their conversation. That interview would be a good starting point if you think you might like the book.

I’ll leave you with something he said in that interview that resonated with me; let’s just say I felt “seen.”

Not only do our efforts to “achieve mastery” over time not work, he said – they push the things that matter the most further and further over the horizon.

“The mundane example I give in the book is that when I was in my early days as a newspaper writer, the better I got at processing tasks and getting through those lists, the more prone I was to postponing the things that really, really mattered,” Burkeman explained. “I would fall into … this notion that I needed lots of spare time and attention and focus to really do those things well.” The diligent thing to do, he told himself back then, was to first get rid of all the “less important tasks that were tugging at my attention – you know, ‘clear the decks.’”

But you “can spend a lifetime clearing the decks,” he said. “The act of clearing them causes them to fill up again faster, for various reasons.”

When you spend all of your time on deck-clearing, you never get around to the important things.

“I began, slowly and late,” he told Tippett, “to notice that that was exactly what was happening in my life.”

You can find Four Thousand Weeks in many places, but I recommend your local independent bookstore, the library, and/or the Libby app, which is a great way to listen to books for free (you can also get e-books, but that’s not my cup of tea).

It’s a lot. I was thinking tonight of the visual of Charlie Brown’s friend Pig Pen always walking around in a dust storm he generates; when the bad news keeps coming, I feel as if I’m walking around in a cloud kicked up by the headlines (both worldly and personal).

The best lesson I took away from losing my closest friend and my sister and my mother was that you can always find joy — or maybe I should say bright spots? — in the middle of hard things.

Many of my recent bright spots have come from Mother Nature, and most were spotted within a mile of my house. It’s easy to get in a mindset that we have to go big distances to see awe-inspiring sights, but thanks to the COVID cabin fever walks my daughter and I took every day, I’m much more appreciative of the beauty and quirks to be found in my neighborhood these days.

Above:

• A sampling from a long swath of dahlias planted by a neighbor during COVID. My mother had a friend named Dahlia when I was growing up, and I thought her name was so exotic.

• A slice of a landscape I love: a hillside that fronts an amazing cupola-topped house on a palatial lot that is so deep that the front stone steps are on one street and the back entrance is on another. The red maple and the cut of late afternoon light did it for me on this particular day.

• A rainbow that caught me by surprise on a day when I needed one.

Another reliable source of joy is books, and I want to recommend a few that reliably bring cheer and beauty. I won’t get into full book review mode, in part because I am not very articulate when I try to explain why I love a given book. If the titles appeal, I hope you’ll look them up. (Hyperlinks take you to the publisher page or to a story about the books.)

Gmorning, Gnight: Little Pep Talks for Me & You ~ Lin-Manuel Miranda with illustrations by Jonny Sun. This book originated when the very joyful Hamilton creator began posting encouraging messages on Twitter in the mornings and evenings. At some point along the way, I’m sure someone said, “You should put these in a book!” And thankfully, he did. The messages are short and sweet and almost always exactly what I need to hear when mornings and evenings roll around.

The Book of Delights ~ Ross Gay. Essays culled from a year-long challenge that Gay assigned himself: to write an essay every day for a year about things that delighted him. The result is delightful. (And quirky; if you’re not usually a fan of quirkiness, give it a try anyway.) This book was so popular that Gay, an award-winning poet, published a second collection, The Book of (More) Delights (have not read it yet), and in 2022, released a collection called Inciting Joy (have read part of that one, and it is lovely).

Devotions ~ Mary Oliver. A big, beautiful collection of Oliver’s poems that was a treasured gift from a friend; I have since given it to several other friends. I am not the most knowledgable or discerning reader of poetry, but I believe Mary Oliver poems speak to everyone. Many of them dovetail with my realization that a lot of natural beauty is close to home – and the idea that joy and sorrow exist side by side.

I hope you’re finding bright spots wherever you can – and that maybe these books might bring you a little joy.

Thanks so much for reading.

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For me, Father’s Day has been fatherless for most of my life; my dad died young when I was very young.

But he left many images and treasures behind, and this past year, my favorite unearthed treasure was this letter he wrote in hopes of getting a summer job that would dovetail with his post-WWII design schooling. As a writer who does not enjoy marketing myself, I admire both my dad’s clear and compelling words and his chutzpah. I wonder if he got the job? (Belk Hensdale was a department store in his hometown; he and my mother moved there after they married, and many years after he died, I took a job at the Belk store at the mall … much less charming than the one where he had worked, but I liked the fact that all those decades apart, both of us would work for the same store.)

I love that articulate, hopeful, determined, young version of my dad — a 23-year-old who had been dropped off in a post-atomic landscape in Japan six weeks after the bombs were dropped and was now back home, carrying on. It must have been a bizarre thing for him and all the others who experienced things I will never wrap my head around.

I wish we could have talked about all of the things he experienced so very young and what his hopes and dreams were back then.

I’m thankful that my mother saved all of these little hints of who he was. It is a gift.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.